2.Â FreeBSD Features

2.1.Â Supported Platforms

FreeBSD has gained a reputation as a secure, stable,
operating system for the IntelÂ® (i386™) platform. However,
FreeBSD also supports the following architectures:

amd64

i386™

pc98

SPARC64Â®

In addition, there is ongoing development to port FreeBSD
to the following architectures:

ARMÂ®

MIPSÂ®

PowerPCÂ®

Up-to-date hardware lists are maintained for each
architecture so you can tell at a glance if your hardware is
supported. For servers, there is excellent hardware RAID and
network interface support.

FreeBSD also makes a great workstation and laptop
operating system! It supports the X Window System, the same
one used in LinuxÂ® distributions to provide a desktop user
interface. It also supports over 13,000 easy to install
third-party applications,
[3]
including KDE, Gnome, and
OpenOffice.

Several projects are available to ease the installation of
FreeBSD as a desktop. The most notable are:

DesktopBSD which
aims at being a stable and powerful operating system for
desktop users.

PC-BSD which provides an
easy-to-use GUI installer for FreeBSD aimed at the desktop
user.

2.2.Â Extensible Frameworks

FreeBSD provides many extensible frameworks to easily
allow you to customize the FreeBSD environment to your
particular needs. Some of the major frameworks are:

Netgraph

Netgraph is a modular networking subsystem that
can be used to supplement the existing kernel networking
infrastructure. Hooks are provided to allow developers to
derive their own modules. As a result, rapid prototyping and
production deployment of enhanced network services can be
performed far more easily and with fewer bugs. Many existing
operational modules ship with FreeBSD and include support for:

PPPoE

ATM

ISDN

Bluetooth

HDLC

EtherChannel

Frame Relay

L2TP, just to name a few.

GEOM

GEOM is a modular disk I/O request
transformation framework. Since it is a pluggable storage
layer, it permits new storage services to be quickly developed
and cleanly integrated into the FreeBSD storage
subsystem. Some examples where this can be useful are:

Creating RAID solutions.

Providing full-blown cryptographic protection of stored data.

Newer versions of FreeBSD provide many administrative
utilities to use the existing GEOM modules. For example, one
can create a disk mirror using gmirror(8), a stripe
using gstripe(8), and a shared secret device using
gshsec(8).

MAC,
or Mandatory Access Control, provides fine-tuned access to
files and is meant to augment traditional operating system
authorization provided by file permissions. Since MAC is
implemented as a modular framework, a FreeBSD system can be
configured for any required policy varying from HIPAA
compliance to the needs of a military-grade system.

FreeBSD ships with modules to implement the following
policies; however the framework allows you to develop any
required policy:

Biba integrity model

Port ACLs

MLS or Multi-Level Security confidentiality policy

LOMAC or Low-watermark Mandatory Access Control data integrity policy

Process partition policy

PAM

Like LinuxÂ®, FreeBSD provides support for PAM,
Pluggable Authentication Modules. This allows an administrator
to augment the traditional UNIXÂ® username/password
authentication model. FreeBSD provides modules to integrate
into many authentication mechanisms, including:

Kerberos 5

OPIE

RADIUS

TACACS+

It also allows the administrator to define policies to
control authentication issues such as the quality of
user-chosen passwords.